André Gorz

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André Gorz (born February 9, 1923 in Vienna as Gerhard Hirsch ; † September 22, 2007 in Vosnon , Département Aube , France ) was a French social philosopher of Austrian origin. Since the 1950s he lived as a publicist in France, was an employee of Jean-Paul Sartre and co-founder of the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur .

For many years a supporter of Sartre's existentialist variant of Marxism , Gorz broke with Sartre after the Paris May 1968 . André Gorz turned to political ecology and became its leading theorist. The central theme in Gorz's reflections is the question of work : liberation from work, fair distribution of work, alienation in work. For him, the right to work and the duty to work belonged together for a long time until he also spoke out in favor of a basic income .

biography

André Gorz was born the son of a Jewish timber merchant from Vienna and a Catholic secretary from Dresden. His birth name was Gerhart Hirsch . His father converted to Catholicism in 1930 because of the spreading anti-Semitism and took the family name Horst . The Nazi persecution escaped Gorz through his schooling in a Swiss boarding school, which he attended at the behest of his mother from the 1939th

After leaving school, he began studying chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (under the name of Gérard Horst ), while at the same time he was already translating from English, writing philosophical essays and political articles for a Swiss cooperative magazine. In Switzerland he met his future wife Doreen Keir, who came from England.

During a lecture tour of Sartre through Switzerland in 1946, he met for the first time, from which a long-term literary-philosophical collaboration developed. In 1949 Gorz moved to France, where he initially worked as a press officer and later as the private secretary of the Indian military attaché in Paris, but soon became editor of the Paris Presse newspaper . At this time the name Gorz appears for the first time; from now on he published as a journalist under the name Michel Bosquet and his socio-philosophical work under André Gorz ( Görz was the name of the city; he had found it as the manufacturer's name on his father's binoculars and apparently thought it was the place of production). Thanks to the support of Pierre Mendès France , the previously stateless Gorz became a French citizen in 1957.

In 1960 Gorz became a member of the editorial board of the magazine Les Temps Modernes, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir , and in 1964 co-founder and deputy editor-in-chief of the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur . In Germany he was a member of the advisory group of the magazine Technologie und Politik at the time , whose publisher was Freimut Duve .

Gorz was particularly politically active in the 1960s and built a reputation for himself as a theoretician of workers' self-government and has been an advocate of political ecology since the 1970s. The focus of current publications was Gorz's concept of emancipation as a liberation that left the industrialist tradition of the left behind in favor of a political morality of autonomy and common sense. Central themes, however, remained distributive considerations about knowledge and work.

Gorz's growth-critical theories for an ecologically compatible restructuring of liberal societies also took up prominent German social democrats and politicians from the Greens in the 1980s. After the collapse of the communist Eastern Bloc, Gorz distanced himself from Marxism, since history is no longer supported by a class and there is no longer a revolutionary subject.

André Gorz committed suicide on September 22, 2007 with his seriously ill 83-year-old wife Dorine in their common house in Vosnon ( Aube ).

plant

The work Le traître (Eng .: The Traitor , 1980), published in 1958, provides information about Gorz's early existence. The autobiography was created under the influence of Sartre's existential philosophy , who also wrote the foreword. At the end of the 1970s, Gorz pointed out in widely acclaimed books that an economic society that was only geared towards growth would not only lead to social, but also to ecological disaster. This made him one of the pioneers of the growth-critical movement . His book Adieux au prolétariat from 1980, which made him known in Germany, was the subject of heated discussion, especially within the trade union-oriented left . Here Gorz develops his vision of a society that is reorganizing itself under post-industrial conditions. The volume Les Chemins du Paradis from 1983 (English: Paths to Paradise ), in which Gorz analyzed the economic crisis of the 1970s, became a cult book for the undogmatic ecological left . In 1988 his main work Métamorphoses du travail (English: Critique of Economic Reason , 1989) appeared, where he analyzes the concept of work and pleads for its redistribution and flexibility. For him, the right to work , the duty to work and civil rights are inextricably linked. "It is not a question of securing a basic income for those excluded from the production process, but of removing the conditions that led to this exclusion". The 1991 volume And now where? contains speeches and magazine articles Gorz about the future of the left and the ecological restructuring of society.

The publication Misères du présent, richesses du possible ( work between misery and utopia , 2000), published in France in 1997, was widely discussed in France , where Gorz sees the end of full employment as an opportunity and examines the question of how functions in such a society could be replaced by other activities. In this book, Gorz justified the basic income with Marxist arguments . In 2003, in his last major work, L'immatériel (English: Knowledge, Value and Capital , 2004) , Gorz stated that knowledge was not suitable for treatment as private property, since it had no commodity character , but should rather be understood as a common good .

Quote

"The goal of a society in which one (s) everyone works less so that everyone can find work and live better is now one of the most important factors in the cohesion of the union and the renewal of social freedom movements."

- Critique of economic reason :

“As a member of society I have the right to demand a share of the socially produced wealth from it; As its member, society has the right to ask me to do the appropriate share of social work. Through the duty that she sets me, she recognizes me as her member. "

- Critique of economic reason :

Publications

Works

  • Strategy for labor: a radical proposal . Beacon Press, 1968.
  • On the strategy of the labor movement in neocapitalism. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
  • The topicality of the revolution. Addendum to the "Strategy of the Labor Movement in Neocapitalism". European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1970.
  • Criticism of the division of labor. 1974.
  • Ecology and politics. Contributions to the growth crisis. 1977.
  • Socialism and revolution. Allen Lane. 1975.
  • Farewell to the proletariat - beyond socialism . (Translated from the French by Heinz Abosch .) European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1980.
  • Paths to paradise. Theses on the crisis, automation and the future of work . (Original title: Les chemins du paradis . From the French by Eva Moldenhauer.) Rotbuch Verlag , Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-88022-279-7 .
  • Critique of Economic Reason. Questions of meaning at the end of the working society . Translated from the French by Otto Kallscheuer . Rotbuch, Berlin 1989. (New edition Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-85869-429-4 )
  • The traitor. With the essay On Aging . (Original 1958 and essay 1961/62, translated from French by Eva Moldenhauer .) Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997. (New edition Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-85869-379-2 )
  • Work between misery and utopia . From the French by Jadja Wolf. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-41017-2 .
  • Knowledge, value and capital. To the criticism of the knowledge economy. From the French by Jadja Wolf. 4th edition. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-85869-282-5 .
  • Ways out of capitalism. (Original title: Écologica . From the French by Eva Moldenhauer.) 2nd edition. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-85869-391-4 .
  • Le fil rouge de l'écologie. Entretiens inédits en français . Willy Gianinazzi (Ed.) Ed. de l'EHESS, Paris 2015, ISBN 978-2-7132-2501-7 .
  • Letter to D. Story of a love. (Original title: Lettre à D. Histoire d'un amour . From the French by Eva Moldenhauer.) 8th edition. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-85869-725-7 .

Essays

interview

Secondary literature

  • Hans Leo Krämer, Claus Leggewie (ed.): Ways into the realm of freedom. André Gorz on his 65th birthday. Rotbuch, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-88022-741-1 .
  • Claus Leggewie / Wolfgang Stenke (eds.): André Gorz and the second left. The topicality of an almost forgotten thinker. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-8031-2785-3 .
  • Adrian Little: The Political Thought of Andre Gorz. Routledge Chapman & Hall, London / New York 1996, ISBN 0-415-13866-3 .
  • Ralf Zwengel (Ed.): Without a proletariat to paradise? On the topicality of the thinking of André Gorz. (= Publication series of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Hessen eV Volume 23). Klartext, Essen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8375-0264-0 .
  • Berliner Debatte Initial eV: Solitär - André Gorz (= year 2013, issue 4). WeltTrends, Potsdam 2013, ISSN 0863-4564.
  • Willy Gianinazzi: André Gorz. Une vie , La Découverte, Paris, 2016, ISBN 978-2-7071-9103-8 .
  • Wolfgang Stenke: The gardener from Vosnon. André Gorz and the ways of freedom. Feature, WDR 2017 (online)

Web links

Footnotes

  1. Claus Leggewie , Wolfgang Stenke (Hr.), André Gorz and the second left , Wagenbach, 2017, p. 7; Willy Gianinazzi , André Gorz. Une vie , Paris, La Découverte, 2016, p. 69.
  2. W. Gianinazzi, op cit. , p. 69.
  3. On the morning of September 24, 2007, a friend of the couple found the news on the front door of the house that visitors should “call the police”. The anniversary of his death was September 22, 2007.
  4. T. Duverger (2011). La décroissance une idée pour demain: une alternative au capitalisme synthèse des mouvements . Sang de la Terre.
  5. Critique of Economic Reason. Berlin 1989, p. 295.
  6. Critique of Economic Reason. Berlin 1989, p. 297.
  7. Critique of Economic Reason ; Berlin, 1989, p. 318.
  8. Critique of Economic Reason ; Berlin, 1989, p. 295.